Posts Tagged ‘misrepresentation’

Okay, this is the final part of the stories behind the tracks on my album Quiet Storm. Parts 1, 2 and 3 can be viewed if you click on those little numbers, and I want to thank everyone once and again for supporting my album and my blog. I really appreciate it, and I hope that these behind-the-music notes have added a little to your enjoyment of my music. On with the show!

18. Role Model (Interlude)

This was originally an entire song which was a rap song with a sung chorus. You can hear the original full version on my High Fashion mixtape but although the lyrics were kinda cool, I wasn’t too keen on my flow in places and I thought that I would rather not have the raps as part of my album. Nevertheless, I appreciated the idea of the chorus and feeling misrepresented in society as a young person, a gay man, a singer, my music tastes, where I come from, my heritage… all those things are categorised and yet how many of us actually fit the stereotypes for those categories? I felt that it led into the next song well, as it is about exposing who I am as a person, and not letting anyone’s pigeon holes or preconceived notions dictate who I am. This is me, and this is…

19. The Truth

This song is probably the most heartfelt I’ve been in any of my songs recorded to date. It discusses my relationship with my family, life and death, my emotional state and insecurities, my childhood, my education, and music. It is the truth of who I am – sometimes we feel sad or hard done by, and other times we remember how happy we have been and whatever happens, we just have to keep going and get on with it anyway. This song is a bit scratchy due to the fact that I have recorded myself playing acoustic guitar on the track (yes, that is me!) and it didn’t work perfectly, though I think it did the job. I liked the guitar and the piano and the beat – it combined together well to be a midtempo R&B joint that was musically quite stable and almost sunny, yet anchored in place by some really heavy lyrics. I thought it would originally have been the album closer, but then you’ll see I changed my mind about that.

20. Last Chance

I wanted the last song proper on the album to be a dance song – something that really went out with a bang! I decided this because sometimes (in keeping with the nocturnal theme of the album) you’re not ready to go home at the end of a night, until the DJ has played one final song that really gets you to annihilate the dancefloor and you can just let yourself go with the music before calling it a wrap. This song is that song – I was inspired by “Work” by Ciara (sampled on the track!), “Get Me Bodied” by Beyoncé, “Boom Boom Pow” by the Black Eyed Peas and just any song that really makes me want to move. Other songs sampled in this are Paulina Rubio’s “Sexi Dance” (at the very end when the track fades out) which gives the song a late-night / early morning sensuous hue, and Beethoven’s “Für Elise” – just because it worked! I was crafting this track for a really long time, and between utilising the beat at the end of “All Night Long” to give the album a sense of circularity and closure, and trying to really fire up the beats and make them incendiary, I just tried to be as crazy as possible. The rap, the off-kilter song structure with multiple hooks and instrumental at the beginning, the extended coda – it’s really going for broke! And that was what I wanted for the last song.

21. Close

To once again fit with the theme of closure and circularity, this is the “outro” of the album, to pair with the “Open” intro – again, I wanted to use the word “Close” in two different ways, both signifying the end of the album and also bringing in the idea of just wanting someone to hold you close, and desiring that intimacy (not necessarily sexually) at the end of the night, just before the sun rises and you’re feeling contemplative.

22. Lucky To Have You (Bonus Track)

My grandfather passed away during the creation of this album, and I remember being at Oxford and hearing on the telephone from my mother and grandmother that his health was really deteriorating. I wrote this song to comfort him (though he never heard it, and neither has anyone else in my family) as he passed away – I wasn’t allowed to go home and see him because it was in the middle of my finals, and he died and the funeral was held all while I was stuck in Oxford and expressly forbidden to come home. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forget that – feeling so helpless far away and yet just glad his suffering was over (his illness was long and protracted). This song is really personal and dedicated to him; it doesn’t fit with the rest of the album, but I nevertheless wanted to include it somewhere so I thought a bonus track was the best opportunity.

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That’s it! Once again, please download my album if you haven’t already, and check out my blog! Thanks for all the support – I really appreciate it and I’ll keep the posts coming! 🙂

Just a quick track-by-track run-through of all the songs on my High Fashion mixtape! I hope you enjoy it and this fleshes out the stories behind the music for you all 🙂

High Fashion

The photos for this mixtape were actually the last thing to get done! I had a lot of ideas for it, but basically it involved playing dressup and taking lots of fun fun pictures of me pouting in designer accessories and too much lip balm and radiating attitude! Trust me, some of the pictures were horrendous, but I was pleased that I got some decent ones that I chose to use. In contrast to the Quiet Storm artwork, which incorporates a lot of dark blues, purples and blacks with white type and layered translucent textures (evocative of the intimate, nocturnal atmosphere embodied by the album), the artwork for the mixtape is very bright, very immediate (no gloss or photoshopping!) and very tongue in cheek – I do not dress that ostentatiously in real life!!! But it was a lot of fun 🙂

Official Boy

This song was recorded a year ago – obviously, it’s a cover of Cassie’s song “Official Girl”… I seem to be the only one who loved that song! I was obsessed with that song at the time because I could relate – I was semi-dating somebody but didn’t know where I stood. (It turned out to be nowhere.) So I got the instrumental and decided to rerecord my version – in the process, I learned a lot about creating vocal layers and harmonies and counter-melodies, and I appreciated how densely the original song is constructed. I also wrote my own rap, which was really fun. I really liked Cassie’s latest material, as I did a cover of this song and “Touch Me” samples another Cassie song, “Nobody But You”.

This song uses the instrumental of Day26’s “Imma Put It On Her”, continuing the love for Bad Boy artists. I have always been impressed by Diddy’s production skills and most of the Bad Boy tracks that have come out over the last 12 years have had really solid music and production. It’s a remix of the song “Hook Boy” on Quiet Storm, and so I changed up the melody and some of the lyrics somewhat, but the basic skeleton of the song remains the same, though this remix has a more celebratory, uptempo feel to it, relishing being in the club and being with the one you love.

Get Me Home (Interlude)

I liked the harmonies on this one, but I have an interlude called “Focused” on the album where I did a superior job of a similar type of harmony, so I removed this track from the album and kept it for the mixtape.

Jump Off (Part I) (Snippet)

The original version of a song which is on the album (appropriately called “Jump Off (Part II)”), this is a very straight-up R&B ballad, no frills. The lyrics have been kept more or less identical between the two songs, but Part II has a much more R&B, nocturnal feel which I fell in love with and which suited the feel of the album as a whole much more. I might finish this version eventually, because I think it has potential, but I kinda left it by the wayside in favour of Part II, which is one of my favourite tracks on Quiet Storm, and very lyrically honest.

Don’t Look Now (Game Over)

This song was written after I was seeing somebody who just suddenly disappeared with the excuse that “I need space”… BULLSHIT mayne!!! I decided to channel my irritation positively, and this record was a cutting, dance-type response to that whole situation. I like the lyrics in it, which pay a nod to “Bad Girl” and “Pretty Boy” by the now sadly defunct Danity Kane, as well as Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable”. My favourite lyric is “dangerous and brokenhearted”, and I briefly considered that as an album title. I love the ring of it, but ultimately there is something about the song that meant it couldn’t hang with the rest of the tracks that made the album, so ultimately it got relegated to the mixtape!

Pronunciation (Interlude)

This was just a big big laugh… it sets the scene for the next song, “Armani Earrings”, which is a track on Quiet Storm that I just had so much fun writing, as it really epitomises swagger! The idea came from the “learn Italian” tapes they play in the bathrooms at Frankie & Benny’s restaurants, and working in The Perfume Shop and getting irritated at how many designers names got mangled by customers on a regular basis. So this interlude is a play on all of those things, as well as a lead-in to the next track.

Armani Earrings

… you’re gonna have to wait for the story behind this one!!! Just enjoy it for now 🙂

Can’t Play A Playa

Originally I was so excited about this track, with the military gunshot-style intro and the catchy hook… but somewhere along the line, although I tried out a lot of different ideas such as having a rap in the middle of the song instead of at the bridge, and multiple hooks and stuff, I felt it lost the sparkle and drive I was aiming for the song to have, so I didn’t feel it was strong enough to make the album. I like the song, but I just couldn’t execute it the way I wanted to so I kept it back for the mixtape.

Wild Heart

During my time at Oxford uni, I became friends online with a guy who got into trying to write and produce his own songs. He sent me this track that he’d written and produced (the production is a slightly different style to anything I’ve done, though the song itself I like), and asked me to resing it. I went a bit crazy with it, attacking it with different melodies and ad-libs, and when I sent it back he was like “WOW you have CHANGED it!!!” I really liked the way it turned out, but I think he was somewhat taken aback… I never really considered this song for the album, especially as my only input into it was changing some of the melodies, harmonies and structuring, but I like it nonetheless so I thought that there was no harm in putting it on High Fashion.

Role Model

The first element of this song that I had was the bassline, and then I just started adding lyrics to it. I remember half of it was written in my head on a car journey with my parents, and the minute we got back in the door I rushed upstairs and spent an hour creating the song. I like the sung chorus element, because it really expressed how I don’t feel that I fit easily into many categories that people try to pigeon-hole me into. In terms of the music I listen to, my educational background and my sexuality (among other things), I don’t really feel that what is widely portrayed in the cinema really represents me, and I wanted to put across the fact that just because there is a stereotype for these things doesn’t mean that everybody necessarily fits them. Although it’s not my finest hour rapping (and I like to think that the rhymes on “Armani Earrings” demonstrate how much I’ve improved), the lyrical subject matter is very true and I am positive I am not the only young person who feels misrepresented. You have to be who you are, for the sake of who you are.

Broke WIthout Remedy

I was listening to Erykah Badu’s most recent album New Amerykah and wanted to do a song which was a bit more unstructured and organic sounding, so I hit up Garageband and started playing with samples. This is the result! I was near the end of my university degree at Oxford, and I was kinda frustrated because I didn’t know where I was going next and I was in a lot of debt and I was just like “what happened? I thought this degree would solve all my problems and it’s just left me with more!” With my new uni course and being so happy and that being beyond me, the perspective I now have of Oxford is perhaps more balanced and I can appreciate the quality of degree and the good friends that I got from there, but at the time of writing / singing the song, I was feeling quite down. Towards the end, my voice cracks and I kept it in as evidence of too much cigarettes + emotional despair = raw vocals!

Another little acapella taster of the “High Fashion” track on my album. The Intro uses some of the backing music, and the outro uses the first verse and chorus of the song. Although I’m not 100% happy about ending the album with 2 acapellas in a row, I definitely thought that these last two songs both deserved to be on the mixtape and both fit at the end.

So there you are! Once again, you can download the mixtape HERE and I really hope you enjoy it! 🙂